A woman with her hands over her eyes in embarrassment.
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One of my friends commented, as I was gushing over my Kindle, that one of its drawbacks was that nobody can see what you're reading. How, he wondered, can you impress people on the train with your sophisticated reading material if nobody knows what it is? (Clarification: He was kidding. I do not truck with people who would take that position seriously, though I'm quite sure they exist.)

This came up again yesterday when I mentioned to someone that I was reading, on that same Kindle, The New Yorker. When I looked at customer reviews of the Kindle version of the magazine, one person noted that she would never, ever subscribe electronically, because it was her understanding that you didn't get all the cartoons. Without the cartoons, what was the point? You have to get all the cartoons! (I'm not sure that's even true; my Kindle got the same 26 cartoons that are featured in the online gallery that purports to be the cartoons from the same issue.) (UPDATE: The New Yorker actually reached out to me, and instead of saying "Our cartoons are funny; you are a jerk," they confirmed that they do indeed include all the cartoons on the Kindle edition. One to grow on!)

Certainly, the cartoons are legendary — if you spend five minutes on the Internet, someone will quote you the one about how "on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

(It's considered impolite to point out that dogs can't type, so this is technically not true, any more than it is true that on the telephone, nobody knows you're a dog, or when you communicate by letter, nobody knows you're a dog. If dogs could write letters or make telephone calls, they would be just as human-like as a dog on the Internet. But I am overthinking it.)

In any event, perhaps if you peruse that slideshow, you will be able to explain to me why I never laugh at the cartoons.

Please help, after the jump.

 

I never like it when other people seem to find something hysterically funny and I don't. It gives me the uncomfortable sense that something is being denied me; that I could be laughing and I'm not.

Take, for instance, the very first one — this one. "Hi, J.B. Guess where I am." Well, you are ... on a deserted island, only your deserted island is a bag of money. Is that right? You are bobbing on a bag of money. In the water. And you are wearing a suit and talking on your cell phone. SOMEONE HELP ME.

Or this one. "My, grandma, what crushing debt you have." So it's Little Red Riding Hood, and her grandmother is in debt. It's Little Red Riding Hood ... doing her grandmother's taxes? In the story, when Red is commenting on grandma's eyes/teeth, Grandma is actually the wolf. But here, there is no wolf, right? I'm not missing a wolf metaphor; the wolf has been removed from the story, right? It's just grandma, hit hard by the economy?

Here, a magician has nothing in his hat ... because of the economy. Har! I just ... I am completely confused.

Doesn't everyone love these cartoons? Am I not sophisticated enough? Is there a joke about the magic of economic theory, or about the relationship between markets and wolves, hiding here somewhere? That magician, in particular, simply strikes me as an example of extraordinary pathos. He's the worst magician ever, in the least successful mostly-dead vaudeville theater in, say, Iowa.

Are they funnier on paper? Are these installments in a much longer series where there are characters developed and storylines explained and themes delved into that are not immediately obvious? Is their charm destroyed by electronic rendering?

Have I done something wrong?